We plan to have two Baan instances running in Euroep(France) and US(CA), what's the best practice to deal with license daemon?
1. network lceunse between Europe and US servers?
2. point Europe instance license to US server?
3. the most cost one, validate separated on each server.

Your timely sharing will be very appreciated.
jke

I do not believe there is a generic best way of doing this. It depends on the case. If you normally run close to max out on licenses you probably want to keep one single pool of licenses shared between both servers so you won't end up with a bunch of available licenses on one server while you are maxed out in the other. Specially when the time zone difference is so big and peak times will be far apart from each other. Now if your WAN is not reliable enough the loss of connectivity between your license daemons might become a problem.

Thanks.
If we validate all license on US server, have another server in Europe, but point license to US server, assume the WAN is stable, do you expect any performance issue for Europe users?

If you do get performance impact it will only be at the time of connecting and when opening objects. I would dare to say you should notice nothing. But as I said I've never tried that configuration.

Thanks.
If we validate all license on US server, have another server in Europe, but point license to US server, assume the WAN is stable, do you expect any performance issue for Europe users?

Performance should be ok and only impact starting new sessions. But the bigger issue is availablibity. Why risk operation sin Europe, if the site in US has some WAN connection problem?

The network (high availability) validation option has no additional costs associated, as far as I know. So I would go that way.

Regards

Markus

...Why risk operation sin Europe, if the site in US has some WAN connection problem?

The network (high availability) validation option has no additional costs associated, as far as I know. So I would go that way.

Regards

Markus

Markus,

In your opinion, how good is the license daemon in detecting the wan connection has been restored after an outage?

If it doesn't you might find yourself running with half your licenses when the timeout is reached and then having to bounce the license daemon in both machines. Of course if Baan does what it is supposed to you will not be in that situation as long as the outage is shorter than the license daemon timeout.

I have mainly experience with the network option in HA clusters. When validating your system you additionally tick the "High Availibility" Option. This option prevents the license daemons from deviding the available licenses by 2 in case of a server crash, where the second server might be gone for a considerable time.

Similar in a WAN environment, your counterpart in the US might be gone for a longer period of time, so again you need the HA option.

Regards

Markus

Markus,


HA option is what I was asking you about. It is when you have this option enabled that you continue to have access to licenses despite a wan outage. However after a timeout (72hs or so) the total amount of licenses gets divided by the number of servers running the HA license. And it should go back to normal once the wan connection is restored. Here is where my question comes in, have you seen this working properly? I had some experience with HA licenses a very long time ago but not recently.

Now supporting your suggestion, in the case of a single licd (HA disabled) running on the US box when you have a wan outage your users in Europe will go down to 0 licenses immediately and will not be able to re-connect until that link is fixed.

Just to clarify things:

My suggestion is to have during validation the network option and the HA option enabled and to validate all servers and to have a licd running on all servers.

And if the validation is correct the effect you are talking about (reduction of licenses after so many hours) will not (!) happen, due to the HA option.

This is proven and tested by around 10 cluster installations, which I did. Unfortunately in the past Baan messed up the generated validation codes quite often in such a way, that the HA option was not validated, even though the customer ticked it.

Regards

Markus

Markus,

Thank you for your invaluable comments. Your experience with HA license is obviously much larger and much more recent than mine.

In the past the explanation given by Baan used to be that the license was programed to do the lic number reduction as a protection mechanism. It was also supposed to resume the total number when the servers were able to communicate to each other again. It was then when it failed.

Cheers!

Eduardo